“And doubtless the present age… prefers the image to the thing itself, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to being… That, which is sacred for it, is but an illusion; but that, which is profane, is the truth. Nay, it sees the sacredness as swelling in proportion to the dwindling of the truth and the growth of illusion, so that the summit of illusion ts for it the summit of sacredness.” Feuerbach (Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity)

1 The entire life of societies wherein modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has withdrawn into a representation.

2 The images that detached from every aspect of life blend in a common stream, wherein the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of contemplation only. The specialization of images of the world is found, completed, in the world of the image autonomized, wherein the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.

3 The spectacle represents itself at once as the society itself, as a part of society, and as an instrument of unification. As a part of society, it is specifically the sector that concentrates all perception and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separated, it is the common ground of the deceived perception and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation.

5 The spectacle cannot be comprehended as an abuse of a mode of vision, as a product of the techniques of mass dissemination of images. It is, rather, a Weltanschauung become effective, materially translated. It is a world vision become objectified.

6 The spectacle, grasped in its totality, is at once the result and the project of the existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real world, its additional decoration. It is the heart of the irrealism of the real society. In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct consumption of entertainment, the spectacle constitutes the present model of the socially dominant life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choice already made in production and its corollary consumption. The form and content of the spectacle are identically the total justification of the conditions and goals of the existing system. The spectacle is also the permanent presence of this justification, in its capacity as occupation of the main part of the time lived outside of modern production.

7 Separation is itself part of the unity of the world, of the global social praxis that splits into reality and image. The social practice, in front of which the autonomous spectacle presents itself, is also the real totality that contains the spectacle. But the split within this totality mutilates it to the point of making the spectacle appear as its goal. The language of the spectacle consists of signs of the ruling production, which at the same time are the ultimate end of this production.

8 One cannot abstractly contrast the spectacle and the actual social activity: such a division is itself divided. The spectacle that inverts the real is in effect a production. Lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle, and simultaneously recapitulates within itself the spectacular order, by imbuing it with positive cohesiveness. Objective reality is present on both sides. Every notion fixed this way has no basis other than its passage into the opposite: reality rises up within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real. This reciprocal alienation is the essence and the support of the existing society.

10 The concept of spectacle unifies and explains a great diversity of apparent phenomena. Their diversity and contrasts are the appearances of that socially organized appearance, which must itself be recognized in its general truth. Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is the affirmation of appearance and the affirmation of human life in its entirety, namely social life, as mere appearance. But the critique that attains the truth of the spectacle exposes it as the visible negation of life, as a negation of life that has become visible.

11 To describe the spectacle, its formation, its functions, and the forces that tend towards its dissolution, certain inseparable elements must be artificially distinguished. In analyzing the spectacle, one speaks, to a certain extent, the very language of the spectacular, in the sense that one moves onto the methodological terrain of the very society that expresses itself in the spectacle. But the spectacle is nothing other than the direction of the total practice of a socio-economic formation, its timetable. It is the historical movement that contains us.

12 The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than “that which appears is good, that which is good appears”. The attitude that it demands in principle is that passive acceptance, which in fact it already has obtained through its manner of appearing without reply, through its monopoly of appearance.

13 The basically tautological character of the spectacle flows from the simple fact that its means are at the same time its ends. It is the sun that never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world and bathes indefinitely in its own glory.

14 The society that rests on modern industry is not accidentally or superficially spectacular, it is fundamentally spectaclistic. In the spectacle, the image of the ruling economy, the goal is nothing, the development is everything. The spectacle aims to achieve nothing but itself.

15 As the indispensable decoration of the objects produced today, as the general presentation of the rationality of the system, and as the advanced economic sector that directly shapes a growing multitude of image-objects, the spectacle is the main production of present-day society.

16 The spectacle subjugates living men to the extent that the economy has totally subjugated them. It is no more than the economy developing itself for its own sake. It is the faithful reflection of the production of things, and the fraudulent objectification of the producers.

17 The first phase of the domination of the economy over social life has brought into the definition of all human accomplishment a manifest degradation of being into having. The present phase of total occupation of social life by the accumulated results of the economy leads to a generalized sliding of having into seeming, from which all actual “having” must draw its immediate prestige and its ultimate function. At the same time all individual reality has become social, directly dependent on social power and shaped by it. Only to the extent that it is not, is it allowed to appear.

18 Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior. The spectacle, as a tendency to make one see through various specialized mediations the world that can no longer be grasped directly, normally finds in vision the one privileged human sense that the sense of touch was for other epochs; the most abstract, and the most mystifiable sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of present-day society. But the spectacle is not identifiable with mere gazing, even combined with listening. It is that, which eludes the activity of men, which eludes reconsideration and correction by their work. It is the opposite of dialogue. Wherever there is independent representation, the spectacle reconstitutes itself.

19 The spectacle is the heir of all the weaknesses of the Western philosophical project that comprehended activity, dominated by the categories of seeing; likewise, it is based on the incessant deployment of the precise technical rationality that ensues from this thought. The spectacle does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality. It is the concrete life of everyone that degraded itself into a speculative universe.

20 Philosophy, as the power of separate thought, and the thought of separate power, could never by itself surpass theology. The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion. Spectacular technology has not dispelled the religious clouds where men had placed their own powers detached from themselves; it has only tied them to an earthly base. Thus the most earthly life becomes opaque and unbreathable. It no longer projects into the sky but shelters within itself its absolute challenge, its fallacious paradise. The spectacle is the technical realization of the exile of human powers into a beyond; it is separation attained inside of man.

21 To the extent that necessity finds itself socially dreamed, the dream becomes necessary. The spectacle is the nightmare of modern fettered society, which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep.

22 The fact that the practical power of modern society detached itself from itself, and established an independent empire in the spectacle, can be explained only by the fact that this practical power continued to lack cohesion and remained in contradiction with itself.

23 It is the oldest social specialization, the specialization of power, that lies at the root of the spectacle. The spectacle is thus a specialized activity that speaks for the multitude of others. It is the diplomatic representation of hierarchic society before itself, where all other expression is banned. The most modern is here also the most archaic.

24 The spectacle is the uninterrupted discourse that existing order propounds about itself, its laudatory monologue. It is the self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence. The fetishistic appearance of pure objectivity in the spectacular relations conceals their nature of relations among men and classes: a second nature seems to dominate our environment with its fatal laws. But the spectacle is not the necessary product of technical development seen as a natural development. The society of the spectacle is on the contrary the form that chooses its own technical content. If the spectacle, taken in the limited sense of “mass media”, which comprise its most glaring superficial manifestation, may appear to invade society as a mere device, this device is in no way neutral, but is the very means suited to its total self-propulsion. If the social needs of the epoch in which such techniques develop can only be satisfied through their mediation, if the administration of this society and all contact among men can no longer take place except through the intermediary of this power of instantaneous communication, it is because this “communication” is essentially unilateral; whereby its concentration ensues in an accumulation, in the hands of the existing system’s administration, of the means that allow it to carry out this particular administration. The generalized cleavage of the spectacle is inseparable from the modern State, namely from the general form of cleavage within society, the product of the division of social labor and the organ of class domination.

25Separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle. The institutionalization of the social division of labor, the formation of classes, had given rise to a first sacred contemplation, the mythical order with which every power shrouds itself from the beginning. The sacred has justified the cosmic and ontological order that corresponded to the interests of the masters; it has explained and embellished that, which society could not do. Thus all separate power has been spectacular, but the adherence of all to such an immobile image only signified the common acceptance of an imaginary prolongation of the poverty of real social activity, still largely felt as a unitary condition. The modern spectacle, on the contrary, expresses what society can do, but in this expression the permitted is absolutely opposed to the possible. The spectacle is the preservation of unconsciousness within the practical change of the conditions of existence. It is its own product, and it has made its own rules: it is a pseudo-sacred entity. It shows what it is: separate power developing in itself, in the growth of productivity by means of the incessant refinement of the division of labor into an apportionment of gestures that are then dominated by the independent movement of machines; and working for an ever-expanding market. All community and all critical sense are dissolved during this movement wherein the forces that could grow by separating are not yet rediscovered.

26 With the generalized separation of the worker and his products, every unitary view of accomplished activity and all direct personal communication among producers are lost. Accompanying the progress of accumulation of separate products and the concentration of the productive process, unity and communication become the exclusive attribute of the system’s management. The success of the economic system of separation is the proletarianization of the world.

27 Due to the success of separate production as production of the separate, the fundamental experience that in primitive societies is attached to a central task is in the process of being displaced, at the crest of the system’s development. by non-work, by inactivity. But this inactivity is in no way liberated from productive activity: it depends on productive activity and is an uneasy and admiring submission to the necessities and results of production; it is itself a product of its rationality. There can be no freedom outside of activity, and in the context of the spectacle all activity is negated. just as real activity has been captured in its entirety for the global construction of this result. Thus the present “liberation from labor,” the increase of leisure, is in no way a liberation within labor, nor a liberation from the world shaped by this labor. None of the activity lost in labor can be regained in the submission to its result.

28 The economic system founded on isolation is a circular production of isolation. The technology is based on isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn. From the automobile to television, all the goods selected by the spectacular system are also its weapons for a constant reinforcement of the conditions of isolation of “lonely crowds.” The spectacle constantly rediscovers its own assumptions more concretely.

29 The spectacle originates in the loss of the unity of the world, and the gigantic expansion of the modern spectacle expresses the totality of this loss: the abstraction of all specific labor and the general abstraction of the entirety of production are perfectly rendered in the spectacle, whose mode of being concrete is precisely abstraction. In the spectacle, one part of the world represents itself to the world and is superior to it. The spectacle is nothing more than the common language of this separation. What binds the spectators together is no more than an irreversible relation at the very center that maintains their isolation. The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate.

30 The alienation of the spectator to the profit of the contemplated object (that is the result of his own unconscious activity) is expressed in the following way: the more he contemplates the less he lives; the more he accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires. The externality of the spectacle in relation to the active man appears in the fact that his own gestures are no longer his but those of another who represents them to him. This is why the spectator feels at home nowhere, because the spectacle is everywhere.

31 The worker does not produce himself; he produces an independent power. The success of this production, its abundance, returns to the producer as an abundance of dispossession. All the time and space of his world become foreign to him with the accumulation of his alienated products. The spectacle is the map of this new world, a map that exactly covers its territory. The very powers that escaped us manifest themselves to us in all their might.

32 The spectacle within society corresponds to a concrete manufacture of alienation. Economic expansion is mainly the expansion of this precise industrial production. That, which grows with the economy in motion for itself can only be the very alienation that was contained in its nucleus.

33 The man separated from his product, ever more powerfully produces all the details of his world, and thus finds himself ever more separated from his world. The more his life is now his product, the more he is separated from his life.

Such a perfect democracy constructs its own inconceivable foe, terrorism. It wishes, in effect, to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results. The history of terrorism is written by the State; it is therefore instructive. The spectating populations certainly can never know everything about terrorism, but they can always know enough about it to be persuaded that, compared with terrorism, everything else must appear more acceptable to them, or in any case more rational and democratic.

The modernization of repression has succeeded in perfecting, first in the Italian pilot-project under the name of “pentiti”, sworn professional accusers; a cohort, which upon its first appearance in the seventeenth century after the Fronde, was designated as “certified witnesses”. This spectacular progress of Justice has populated Italy’s prisons with thousands of convicts to do penance for a civil war that did not take place, a kind of mass armed insurrection that, by chance, never actually happened, a putsch woven of such stuff as dreams are made on.

It can be said that interpretations of terrorism’s mysteries appear to have brought about a symmetry between contradictory opinions; as if two schools of philosophy construed absolutely incompatible metaphysical edifices. Some would see terrorism nothing more than a number of acts of blatant manipulation by the secret services; others would judge the terrorists blameworthy only in their total lack of historical understanding. But a little historical logic should rapidly convince us that there is nothing contradictory in recognizing that people who understand nothing of history can just the same be manipulated; and even more readily than others. And it is much easier to lead to “repentance” someone to whom one can demonstrate having known in advance everything that he thought he did freely. It is an inevitable effect of clandestine forms of organization of the military type, that it suffices to infiltrate a few people at certain points of the network, to make the many march and fall. Critique, when evaluating armed struggles, must sometimes analyze one of these particular operations, without being led astray by the general resemblance that they all will possibly share. We should expect, as a logical probability, that the State’s security services intend to use all the advantages they find in the realm of the spectacle, which has indeed been organized long ago to that very end: on the contrary, it is a difficulty in perceiving this, which is astonishing, and rings false.

The present objective of judicial repression in this domain consists, of course, in generalizing matters as fast as possible. What is important in this commodity is the packaging, or the labeling: the price codes. One enemy of spectacular democracy is the same as another, just like spectacular democracies themselves. Thus there must be no right of asylum for terrorists, and even those who have not yet been accused of being terrorists can certainly become them, with extradition swiftly following. In November 1978, dealing with the case of a young print worker, Gabor Winter, wanted by the West German government mainly for having printed certain revolutionary leaflets, Mlle Nicole Pradain, acting on behalf of the Department of Public Prosecution in the Appeal Court of Paris, quickly showed that the “political motives” that could be the only grounds for refusing extradition under the Franco-German agreement of 29 November 1951, could not be invoked: “Gabor Winter is a social criminal, not a political one. He refuses to accept social constraints. A true political criminal does not reject society. He attacks political structures and not, like Gabor Winter, social structures.” The notion of acceptable political crime only became recognized in Europe once the bourgeoisie had successfully attacked previous social structures. The nature of political crime could not be separated from the varied objectives of social critique. This was true for Blanqui, Varlin, Durruti. Nowadays there is a pretense of wishing to preserve a purely political crime, like some inexpensive luxury, a crime which doubtless no one will ever have the occasion to commit again, since no one is interested in the subject any more; except for the professional politicians themselves, whose crimes are rarely pursued, nor for that matter called political. All crimes and offenses are effectively social. But of all social crimes, none must be seen as worse than the impertinent affectation to still want to change something in a society that regards itself as having been so far only too kind and patient, but no longer wishes to be blamed.